• Question: when will the world end?

    Asked by anon-243315 to Pan-ngum, Natalia, Mick, Manjit, Filipe, Bruce on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Michael Schubert

      Michael Schubert answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Nobody knows the real answer to this question, I’m afraid! We know that it’s not likely to be for a very long time, but it’s difficult to say exactly how long. Humans could start having trouble living on Earth as soon as 500,000 years from now (which is still a very long time!), but other things will probably continue to live on the planet for millions of years – perhaps even longer.
      One astronomer thinks that our planet itself might be destroyed in seven to eight billion years, when the Sun grows so big that the Earth falls into it, but this is just a hypothesis (meaning it’s an idea that makes sense scientifically, but it hasn’t been fully tested yet). Of course, by then, humans might have moved to other planets and started to explore outer space!

    • Photo: Natalia Brodaczewska

      Natalia Brodaczewska answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Mick answered this question really well. We humans tend to think that the world ends and begins with us but actually the universe is so big and so old that our lives play a very tiny role in it. So the world will probably keep on going for a long time (like many billions of years long) after the human race is gone and nobody really knows for sure what will happen to it and when everything will end. But yes, planet Earth can continue to exist only as long as our Sun is alive and that is, as Mick has said, a few billion years away. We need to remember though that things change over time – the Earth wasn’t always like it is today and it will keep on changing over the years. Climate will change, some organisms may disappear but some new ones may evolve that are better adjusted to the new conditions. Even continents don’t stay the same – some theories say that eventually all continents will collide and form one super-continent surrounded by one huge ocean. So the world may look very different a few hundred million years from now!

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